Translator training in Canada and Russia

The purpose of this paper is to shed some light onto contemporary translation didactics as a “virgin” field of applied TS that cannot be successfully developed without a new, multidisciplinary approach that would put forward the specificity of translator training as a distinct, socially valuable practice. We hypothesize that as socially-specific, practice-oriented products of the interaction between the systems of translation and of professional education, translator training programs are dependent on the social perception of translating activity as well as on the degree of its institutionalization as a profession. Given that contemporary translation and interpretation practices, as well as translator training programs, are limited to local manifestations, the social and cultural discrepancies impede any comparativism in this field of applied TS. However, in applying a sociological approach to translator training, we propose a methodological framework for a sociologically-informed comparative analysis that would lift the cultural and institutional barriers that until now have been distorting our vision of translation as a global social practice and have thus prevented us from conducting comparative analysis of a wide variety of translational phenomena as manifested in different locales, conceived in terms of both time and space. In order to illustrate our propositions, we present the reader with a case study of the most prototypical translator training programs in Canada and Russia – countries that, due to the differences in the theoretical, practical and didactic setup of their respective fields of translation and interpretation, offer appropriate support for our comparative methodology.